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The summer the global acaeme has celebrated, with much flourish, the 150th birth anniversary of Sigmund Freud, one of the four eponymous individuals who have defined the dominant world image in our times-the others being Darwin, Marx and Einstein. Ti is surprising therefore that the huge mass of writings published on the occasion, by some of the besty known academics and Freud scholars, has turned out to be a tame affair, perhaps aspects of Freud’s worldview have become so much a part of our life that his capacity to shock has now declined. Perhaps the academics and the universities so thoroughly dominate the intellectual domain in the west that debates on the Freudian heritage have mostly centred on the gradual exit of psychoanalysis from medical schools, its triumphant entry into literary theory and cultural studies, and its new love affair with film studies and popular culture. Certainly I have not seen many serious efforts this summer to grapple with the larger global significance of psychoanalysic and its fate outside North and West Europt.
Those who try to deploy Freud’s thought and method to map human subjectitvities outside the west are likely to have other reasons for finding the Summer;s fare insipid. Looking back on the last 50 years, perhaps the most significant new contribution of applied psychoanalysis has been towards our under understanding of human violence. When Freud’s Psychologicus of Dreas heralded the beginning of the age of Homo Psychologicus, it was the theory of psychosexuality that provoked most controversy. In the post-world War llera, the focus has shifted to violence. In the African and Asian colonies, this change took place much earlier.
In India, despite the fond belief of many, the theory of psycho sexuality has never aroused the anxiety that it did in fin-de-siecle Vienna of Dewardian England. Not even when psychoanalysis first come to India in the 1910s, Puritanism was not unknown to India, but its main bastion was the urban middle class. Even there, few found Freud’s emphasis on sexuality more shocking than, say, some of the Tantrick categories and may left-handed religious practices and thought.
Indians in diaspora, perennially waiting to be shocked by the irreverence of psychoanalysis, will be very hurt that, in India, the first generation of applied psychoanalysts did not consider very many things sacred enough to be outside the purview of their discipline. Their readers were not offended by offended by their audacity either. In the 1930s was published the first psychoanalytic essay on Tagore already India’s national poet and deified as a timeless genius. No-body was embarrassed, not even Tagore himself.
Indeed, Carl Jung never found the same degree of acceptance among Indian psychologists and psychiatrists as Freud did. Jung had great admiration for Indian thought and there were convergences between his thought and aspects of Indian philosophy. He also visited India and was associated with the establishment of two university departments of psychology in India. But serious intellectuals in India were not collecting